Editors’ Note

Roopika Risam and Jennifer Guiliano

It’s hard to believe that we are wrapping up our fifth year of publishing Reviews in Digital Humanities with our December 2024 issue. At some point, we may have to stop calling Reviews a “pilot”! This month, we’re happy to share a special issue, “Games and Digital Humanities,” full of exciting projects, edited by James O’Sullivan and Astrid Ensslin.

We’d like to take a moment to share some stats on Reviews from the last five years:

• 225+ reviews of projects, published spanning a mesmerizing range of topics, methods, and fields;

• More than 500K page views and more than 135K unique users from more than 150 countries;

• Top 10 countries in our readership: the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, China, Russia, Australia, Mexico, Germany, and France;

• Top 10 Project Registry keywords: 20th century, public humanities, contemporary, African and African diaspora studies, Latino/x studies, geography and geohumanities, 19th century, curriculum and pedagogy, history, and postcolonial studies; and

• 28 issues from our open submissions process, 25 special issues, 3 topic editor issues, and 1 partner issue.

Right now, the journal is officially on winter break until January 15th, but our Metadata and Discovery Specialist, Roxanne Shirazi, and our database developer, Monisha Raju, are hard at work on backend improvements to our workflow. We’re grateful to the Mellon Foundation and Indiana University Indianapolis for supporting their work.

We’re looking forward to an exciting year of new issues for you, with more global content and more from our topic editors. In the meantime, be sure to wrap up your year with the fantastic “Games and Digital Humanities” issue from James and Astrid! Don’t miss their incredibly thoughtful guest editors’ note about the relationship between video games and digital humanities or the excellent projects in the issue.

Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Want us to review your project? Contact the editors, Jennifer Guiliano and Roopika Risam, by email or through the Twitter, Bluesky, or Mastadon hashtag #ReviewsInDH.  

Guest Editors’ Note

James O’Sullivan and Astrid Ensslin

Video games — a term which, at least in this context, incorporates a whole plethora of game-ish digital artifacts from text adventures to nonverbal sonic play spaces in virtual reality (VR) — reside, typically, on the periphery of the digital humanities. The community of scholars and practitioners across humanities disciplines that are exploring games in the name of digital humanities has grown steadily in the past decade (e.g. Ensslin et al. 2021; Fraser 2015; Hergenrader 2016; Iantorno 2020; Jones 2015; Pelletier-Gagnon & Rockwell 2019; Ruberg 2018), but they’re certainly not as commonplace as those working in domains like, say, text mining and cultural analytics.

But games are immersive digital stories through which complex matters of identity, culture, and society can be problematized and remediated. Games offer a series of narrative and expressive affordances beyond the capabilities of print. Games are superior environments for learning and teaching through systemics, agency and procedurality, which has inspired scholars in digital pedagogies. Games are tricky born-digital objects, posing significant challenges in access, preservation, and representation. In other words: the use and study of video games is inherently digital humanities.

While video games are well accounted for through game studies and adjacent disciplines, other fields in the humanities and social sciences — including digital humanities — have a lot to gain from further engagement with the form. As argued by Jane McGonigal in Reality is Broken, video games have the potential to re-imagine our collective social futures. McGonigal’s book is prefaced with a quote from Bernard Suits, which reads: “[Games] are clues to the future. And their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation.” It does not come as a surprise, then, that games have begun to be studied as tools for sustainable development and envisioning utopian futures rather than the far more common dystopian apocalypses (Pederson 2021).

Imagine the great literary works of our time made new as games. Imagine a game as an edition, or an edition as a game. Imagine any social, cultural, or historical epoch or inequality re-interpreted and interrogated as a game. As digital humanists — as humanists and social scientists — we should be exploring, with far greater enthusiasm, what games can do for our respective intellectual practices. 

This issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities treats some of those projects and practitioners who are already utilizing video games in their research, or indeed, examines initiatives which are exemplars of how games should be used in the humanities and social sciences:

Jessica Laccetti reviews a digital preservation project by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston — better known as Dreaming Methods — developed in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University’s Alice Bell. Digital Fiction Curios is a game within a game, or rather, an archive (or virtual curiosity shop) within a game. Curios is a VR platform that allows users to engage with early Flash fiction, functioning as both an essential piece of digital literary heritage and as a creative, re-imagining of old digital storytelling through newer digital storytelling.

The Scalar-based Pathfinders project by Stuart Moulthrop and Dene Grigar, reviewed by Hannah Ackermans, revives ephemeral works of early hypertext literature in a bookish (but nonetheless multimodal) form. Pathfinders provides a comprehensive documentation of key works from the Eastgate School and beyond, including artist statements, filmed walkthroughs, and textual histories. While many works of electronic literature’s first generation can no longer be experienced directly — unless one has a functioning Mac IIe or Classic at hand — Pathfinders demonstrates how media archaeology can, at the very least, provide documentary evidence of how a piece existed and was meant to be experienced.

Developed by UC Santa Cruz and Stanford, The Game and Metadata Citation Project (GAMECIP), reviewed by Joseph G. Medina, seeks to create a metadata schema for digital game cataloguing. It includes various visualization tools that map relationships between games, facilitating discovery and scholarly exploration. The adoption of its metadata by the Library of Congress underscores its value and remedies a substantial gap in game citation practices.

Finally, Kenzie Gordon reviews Tiltfactor Lab, an innovative hub for creating game-based projects in digital humanities and social psychology. Founded by Mary Flanagan at Dartmouth College in 2003, the Lab has developed digital, VR, tabletop, and live-action games on topics like bystander intervention and virology, with notable projects like Metadata Games that crowdsourced over 167,000 tags for digital collections. Tiltfactor’s approach is guided by social psychology and the Values at Play framework, and it remains a leader in social impact gaming and a model for combining game design with academic research.

We would like to thank our reviewers for their insightful commentaries and the project leaders for their key contributions to the fast evolving field of games and digital humanities.

References

Ensslin, Astrid, Carla Rice, Sarah Riley, Christine Wilks, Megan Perram, Hannah Fowlie, Lauren Munro, and Aly Bailey. 2021. “Bodies in E-lit.” In Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities, edited by J. O’Sullivan and D. Grigar, 91–102. New York: Bloomsbury.

Fraser, Benjamin. 2015. “Representing Digital Spaces: Videogames and the Digital Humanities.” In Toward an Urban Cultural Studies, Hispanic Urban Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498564_8.

Hergenrader, Trent. 2016. “The Place of Videogames in the Digital Humanities.” On the Horizon 24 (1): 29–33. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-08-2015-0050.

Iantorno, Marcus. 2020. “GameSound, Quantitative Games Analysis, and the Digital Humanities.” Digital Studies/le Champ Numérique 10 (1): 2. https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.319.

Jones, Steven E. 2015. “New Media and Modeling.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118680605.ch6.

McGonigal, Jane. 2011. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. London: Penguin.

Pederson, Claudia Costa. 2021. Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pelletier-Gagnon, Jérémie, and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2019. “The Replaying Japan Conference: Bringing Together Japan Game Studies and Digital Humanities.” Journal of the Japanese Association for Digital Humanities 4 (1): 1.

Ruberg, Bonnie. 2018. “Queer Indie Video Games as an Alternative Digital Humanities: Counterstrategies for Cultural Critique through Interactive Media.” American Quarterly 70 (3): 417–38. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2018.0029.